Wardha-Yavatmal Rail Line Hits Jungle Red Tape & Wrong Forest Land Entries

Nagpur: Delays and cost overruns in the Wardha-Nanded-Yavatmal railway project, caused partly by inaccurate forest land entries in revenue records, have prompted Maharashtra govt to now launch a statewide drive to update forest land entries in the 7/12 revenue documents. The govt has set May 31 as the deadline to update land records, which will impact a major land parcels in Vidarbha which accounts for a major portion of forest land in the state.The core problem is a longstanding disconnect between two parallel sets of lands records, one kept with the revenue department through the 7/12 extract, and one tracked by the forest department in its internal registers. Over time, these two sets drifted apart. In many cases, forest land that was allocated for various purposes decades ago, in some cases before 1980, was never formally denotified, so its legal status remains forest land.But the 7/12 record was updated to show the name of the allottee as occupant, with the forest notation quietly disappearing. This created a legal grey zone as the land is still forest land in eyes of the law, but no longer appears as such in the revenue record. Over decades, private parties have bought and sold such land, encroachments happened and litigation has multiplied. With Supreme Court also issuing directions in various such related petitions, the state has to ensure compliance for which the records need to be reconciled. The govt has prepared a three-tier process. At the first level, forest range officers will cross-check their own records against the talathi's 7/12 entries and identify mismatches. These mismatches will then be compiled into a list and sent up to the deputy conservator of forests, who will verify whether the land is indeed forest land as per departmental records. The deputy conservator will then send a complete proposal with supporting documents to the district collector, who will carry out the 7/12 correction through the prescribed revenue procedure. The May 31 deadline applies to clearing the backlog of entries that were never correctly recorded in the first place. The forest department was also directed to take immediate possession of their land currently held by the Revenue Department, which was never allocated for any specific purpose. On such land, forest officials have been asked to begin plantation and conservation work, incorporating the transferred land into its working plans. While this may solve some immediate problems, forest officials say that forest land is continuously growing through new notifications, compensatory afforestation and acquisition processes which means this land record updation process will have to continue beyond the deadline.
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